MY INVOLVEMENT IN WORKING WITH PEOPLE AFFECTED BY CONFLITS

 Director of War Trauma Foundation: The Hague, 21st January 2010. When I was born in late December 1956, I did notknow that 29 countries from Africa and Asia had just met one year before (from April 18th to April 24th, 1955) in Bandoeng – Indonesia in order to condemn colonialism and affirm their strong will to emancipation. This move strengthened the trends towards political independence. By that time, our African Great Lakes Region was entering into turmoil with the complex implication of Belgium around the two main ethnic groups with rivalry of some of their socio-political leaders. The first big violent eruption occurred in 1959 in Rwanda with massive massacres and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing as refugees in neighbouring countries. I was two years old by then. I will have to learn the legacy of all this from my parents and from other people around me in our oral tradition, elaborating

When you asked any Burundian to share on the conflicts Burundi underwent, peak periods of those conflicts will be evoked as being 1961, 1965, 1968, and especially 1972, 1988, 1991 and finally from 1993 to 2006. And for all those years, national policies promoted by the ruling elites where geared around amnesia and refusal of traditional mourning ceremonies.  The situation became even more complex and difficult to deal with these last years with the new regionalization of identities for the control of power and economic resources in the Great Lakes Region. 
I grew up in such an environment. The first biggest crisis I really experienced was in 1972 when tens of thousands people were killed and more than 300 000 had to flee to Tanzania and to Congo. I was 16 years old attending my grade 4 secondary school when I started realizing what it meant to be confronted with massive massacres. When I went for holidays during long vacation I was told what happened and learnt of the death of some of my relatives. I kept wondering how this kind of madness can cover a whole nation and kept meditating on the catastrophe as I still do today. I thought that we should work in order to build a better future for the daughters and sons of our people. Social bonds have been severely disrupted. When I decided to become a priest my dream was to help people efficiently rebuild trust and confidence. But even then, I found that I needed more than the normal training for a priest.
We are living in a context where we have deep historical wounds that are not easy to get healed. Past wars continue being present in social archives and memories. Burundi is trying to get involved in the process of Transitional Justice Mechanisms with provisions of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But as we know, transitional justice mechanisms constitute a look in the past, reopening the memory and the wounds of the past, which brings in hopes and fear at the same time.
The cost we had to pay for all this past violence is very high. We have a humanitarian cost with all the massive killings, the political cost with all the structural dismembering, the material cost with all the destruction of goods and infrastructures, the ecological cost with the destruction of the environment, the social cost with hatred, suspicion and exclusion that have been developed in that huge region, the cultural cost with the destruction of the value basis, the psychological cost with all the accumulated trauma spread all over the social setting, the spiritual cost with the breaking down of the spiritual beliefs that had shaped the social fabric for centuries. Rehabilitating all those sectors is a tremendous enterprise we will have to undertake with the support of men and women of good will, with different partners, with the international community and other countries. This will have to be done within countries but also on a regional basis as conflicts have developed today with a growing regional dimension.
I remember that when I came back to Burundi after 7 years of various commitments in Congo, in Rome and in Switzerland within the Dominican Order (my religious family) I found a torn out country with a very high level of suspicion and hatred. War was still raging in some parts of Burundi. Reflecting on which contribution I should make for my country, I came to the conclusion that the value basis had been broken and needed a strong restoration. With some other dreamers we decided to open Centre Ubuntu which is a kind of laboratory for peace building and reconciliation with the aim of helping restore the value basis. When facilitating community mobilization within the country, we were surprised to see many people already drunk at 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning. We were also hearing many very sad stories related to the increase of domestic violence and sexual abuses, even on very small children and babies. It is while sharing those sad stories that we came across people who knew War Trauma Foundation and referred us to them. War Trauma Foundation people accepted to give us some support even if the first contact with them was not easy. Plans were set up and implemented for training in helpful listening, counselling and psychosocial mobilization in a community approach for war affected contexts. Since 2005, we have been evolving with them and the School of Psychology of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. This training brought together groups from Burundi, Eastern DRC and Western Tanzania under the umbrella of a single network called Projet Colombe. Members from Burundi have already attended training of trainers’ sessions, and they are now transferring their knowledge to local workers bringing the training skills they acquired into practice. We have a national network in Burundi calledRéseau Ubuntu which comprises 12 local organizations with 93 people trained in psychosocial mobilization within a community approach.
It is wonderful to see people regaining their inner energies through those community mobilization activities, especially the use of the methodology of Narrative Theatre. When the value basis is being rebuilt and the trauma being handled, you see people opening themselves to initiatives related to being active in earning their living. They express readiness to solidarity and common actions in their communities. They feel happy of the increase of their social capital. This is what we have been experiencing these last 2 years. In some of the place we have been doing the community mobilization activities, we have started developing a new phase of our program in consolidating the benefits of peace through development activities and we can see this rebuilding of communities starting little by little. We bring people in a three steps training process starting with a training on values, followed by a training in trauma before engaging them in a simplified program on project cycle management. We commend with deep gratitude the help we have been receiving from War Trauma Foundation of course, but also from some other Dutch organizations like CORDAID, Mensen met een Missie, Stichting Vluchteling and Comité Nederland Burundi. We also wish to thank the Dutch people and their various institutions for their support to Burundi and to the African Great Lakes Region.